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One sunny day, we went to look for lions in Kruger National Park in South Africa. We spotted zebras, giraffes, a leopard, a rhinoceros, elephants, hippopotamuses, baboons, impalas, kudus, a variety of birds and more fawns and monkeys and even, warthogs and crocodiles…but not the elusive king of beasts.

We heard four lions had escaped from Kruger during our sojourn. But did we meet any of them?

I think I heard them at midnight as I woke up to the sounds of roars in my hotel room at Kruger gate.

My elder son and our guide heard them too around six in the morning when they were queuing up for tickets to enter Kruger. We had to buy a permit every time we went into Kruger. As lions are supposed to be more likely to be visible in the small hours of the morning, we decided to enter as soon as the gates opened at 6.30 am. The rangers had said the lions were at the bridge in the hedges.

Lioness stalking it’s prey

We saw a lioness stalking her meal of water bucks around mid-day. Unfortunately, the waterbucks had sixth sense and walked gracefully to the other side of the waterhole, leaving the lioness hungry and lonely. She ultimately disappeared into the bushes.

On our last day, we saw three lionesses basking in the sun on a sand bank mid-morning. We were so excited that we got off the car and stood on the bridge watching them! Getting out of the vehicle is not something one does in Kruger for one could frighten the animals or become a prey to them incase they are hungry and starved, though they are supposed to be rather averse to human meat.

Male Impalas

Impalas are popular on the menu for predators. We spotted a leopard stalking a herd of impalas. A drongo let out a warning cry and alerted the impalas. The males stood alert looking out in all directions for the leopard. The leopard was cornered. Our guide told us a leopard is wary of the male impala’s antlers, which could well injure them, thus, retarding their ability to hunt. And if they were not able to hunt, they would starve and die. The leopard tried to go into hiding in the bushes but the impalas got the better of him. Four males with big antlers stood facing him as at least twenty to thirty female and young impalas walked gracefully away… There was no running, no chasing, no roaring… none of the excitement we had thought would be a part of our jungle adventure.

Though we did not see predators chase preys, we did see impalas and wildebeests chase each other in play and we did get chased by angry elephants a couple of times.

Giraffe grazing

Kudu crossing

Wildebeest crossing

Rhino crossing

Zebra crossing

Animals by and large liked to cross roads that were made for men to drive on in Kruger. We saw zebras crossing, impalas crossing, monkeys crossing, kudus crossing, wildebeests crossings rhino crossing… and, we thought, therefore, as a matter of course elephants crossing…

The first time the elephant that was headed for the road got angered when my thirteen-year-old shouted for excitement on seeing a bull come towards the road and the car. Our windows were open. His voice carried and the elephant headed for us and our guide started the car and headed for the far distant reaches…

An angry elephant

The second time, we queued up with a number of cars to watch a herd cross the road. The big ones crossed. The little ones crossed. The medium ones crossed. But, the biggest one had yet to cross. We were all watching one young elephant that seemed to have turned berserk and rushed every now and then to the road and trumpeted. We wondered what was up? We also wondered what had happened to the biggest one till our guide saw a huge, angry elephant charging towards the car in his rear view mirror as the vehicle was in it’s path. The big bright red object was not an obstruction the giant elephant cared for and she would have it out of her way…Suddenly with a strange purr, the frightened red object ran off at full speed!

The elephant crossed the road and passing cars heaved a sigh of relief and congratulated us on our lucky escape!

Why this sole elephant decided to cross the road where we had parked is an issue on which we still need to ponder and wonder…

One of the best ways for spotting animals in Kruger is to stop where there is a crowd of cars. That is how we spotted our lions, the elephant herds, giraffes and zebras…and a number of other sightings. And our car started the crowding for the leopard that my husband had found stalking the impalas. Other cars followed to watch the drama. In Kruger, humans stay in car cages and view the animals that roam freely. Sometimes, the animals walk right by your car. Occasionally, they walk with your car. Birds hop by. Once a flock Guinea fowls crossing the road held up traffic! Sometimes, it is monkeys…I recall how vehicles containing humans drew to a halt when some baby monkeys decided to play a game of hopscotch in the middle of the road!

Calf drinking milk

Another time, we paused as not only were elephants meandering all over but also a calf had decided to drink milk from his/her mamma in the middle of a jungle path. Cars waited patiently as the animal finished it’s feed and frisked off merrily behind his/her mother.

Though we spent two-and-a-half days looking for lions in Kruger, we saw very less of the park as it stretches over an area that could contain more than 27 Singapores, and beyond to Mozambique, Zimbabwe and the Limpopo river. We only saw the part around Sabi River and drove out ultimately through the South Gate, close to Nelspruit. The land rolled out for miles beckoning animal lovers. It was relaxing and entertaining to watch crocodiles with their mouth open, waiting for their dinner at the water holes, hippopotamuses stroll into a stream and giraffes munch leaves in the afternoon sun. We even caught two young hippos play and splash water at each other.

A variety of eagles, vultures and birds dotted the landscape. At lunch, we were surprised by a Cape glossy starling waiting for crumbs. At dinner, outside Kruger gate, we had a night visitor from the park, a bush baby. It created a stir among the tourists. It did a round of the Lapa barbecue area and we were all taking pictures of it. Cute would be the right word for this exhibitionist! The next day, we had a picnic breakfast at a hilltop in Kruger and had a yellow-billed hornbill visit us. It even posed for our cameras…

Cape glossy starling

Brown snake Eagle

Storks in a social weaver’s nest

Red-billed hornbill

Yellow-billed hornbill

There are many lakes, waterholes and hills. The part that edges Mozambique is very scenic. We saw the Orpen Dam with its lush vegetation, the South African blue crane, Egyptian geese, hippos and crocodiles. We watched the animal and bird life through binoculars as they were unreachable and far…

But we had still not seen a lion. The land with its unique vegetation and animal life concealed the king from us.

I was also wondering if humans had ever inhabited this vast landscape or had it always been home of only animals? There were no clear answers till I googled …The land had earlier belonged to the Tsonga people, who were evicted by Paul Kruger, the president of the Transvaal Republic between 1883 and 1900 and other nature park lovers. The first cars drove into Kruger in 1926. Paul Kruger played a heroic role in the Boer wars and left the country when the Boers faced defeat in the hands of the British in the 1900s. He died in 1904 and was brought back to South Africa to be given a hero’s funeral and buried in Pretoria.

I wonder what happened to the Tsonga people…Perhaps the lions that evaded us through our entire sojourn in Kruger could tell us…

Maybe the lions in Kruger National Park avoided us because we had seen a lion behind a caging of electric wires in the Lion Safari in Johannesburg. That time, we had got off the car on the way to the Cradle of Humankind and the lion was fenced…We did not explore the park as we wanted to experience the wilds in Kruger…instead we went to see the goldmines and were taken around by a Tsonga guide. She told us that her name meant ‘to give’ in Tsonga!

My home is anywhere under the blue skies. I enjoy drifting like a cloud, exploring the world and in my thoughts the outer space. I see no boundaries… no limits in space or time…no barriers of cultures, language, religion or politics…

However, when recently a friend asked me why I was not contributing to develop my home…the place whose language I use as my mother tongue and where my ancestors had paused for a considerable period of time, I grew defensive instinctively. I tried to condense my life… Then, I started to say that I believe in mankind and not borders…and therefore lacked a need to belong or to be tied down to a region. I explained I try to help people in need wherever they are irrespective of borders. I see myself as a citizen of the world, a term coined by my fourteen-year-old more than half a decade ago…

The simple answer would have been do I consider the place my home…? I have never lived there. My great grandfather moved out… and none of his children returned to the region, leave alone his grand children… his ancestors had lived there for probably a little less than one and a half centuries. Before that, they were in an area that now belongs to another country…The first time I visited the city for a few days was when I was sixteen. Subsequently, I have visited the town a number of times because I really like the place. The issue now is that for the last twenty-five years, I have not even lived in the country I was born. For, more than the last couple of decades I have been roaming the world. I have lived in a number of countries, including China…

And yet stories are made and songs are sung to glorify Man’s homing instinct. John Denver’s song… Country road take me home to the place I belong…is a song I liked all along… but perhaps I like it for the ‘blue ridge mountains’ and the ‘… river’, for ‘the misty taste of moonshine’… I am not quite sure…

I love L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, again a story that centres on the protagonist Dorothy’s need to return home. I almost wept when Dorothy after her adventures in the land of Oz clicked her magic shoe clad feet and repeated, “There is no place likehome. There is no place like home…” and she was magicked back to her home in Kansas…to the farm…and to aunty Em…Dorothy’s whole adventure took place because she wanted to return home from where she had been deposited by a swirling tornado, in the wonderful Land of Oz with it’s rainbow, Emerald Palace and magical creatures…

Analysing my tendencies, I would probably have continued in the Land of Oz like the wizard, who could not leave because the balloon did not take off…yet the story is about Dorothy and not the wizard…

There is something magical about visiting unexplored lands, a kind of promise that opens new horizons for the mind and heart. I loved reading the travels of Marco Polo, even though it may have had it’s biases. Tagore has a song that says “kothao amar hariye java neyi mana, mone, mone…” ( “I can lose myself anywhere in my mind…”).

…And I do find myself getting lost in the mists of time when I read Marco Polo. Those days they wandered in search of trade through so many lands fraught with so many dangers. Then, at some point Marco returned home facing more adventures, weaving more fantasies (he talks of unicorns the size of elephants, cannibals and men with tails!). Despite his wonderful adventures he returned home, first to be imprisoned, then to become a merchant. But, what endears him to the world is the retelling of his marvelous adventures by his co-prisoner Rustichello da Pisa…

Sometimes, I wonder if all our ancestors had returned to their home, like Dorothy and Marco Polo, where would we all be? In the heart of Africa where mankind originated, where Lucy danced in the wilds? And how many people would the continent support? If we also retained our original culture and homes, what would we be like?

Perhaps, that is why this summer I am off to find answers to these questions in the rolling plains of Savannah grasslands that beckon me with the lure of endless mysteries… I am off to explore the part of the landmass where our ancestors originated…

The land that was first populated by man rolls out an invitation to explore why we all did not return home or why we developed other parts of the world which we spread out to populate over centuries and millenniums…and not our original home…

People started using a language to communicate at some point in history…They say about a 100000 years ago… could be more… some say 200,000 years ago… Intellectuals and scientists are still trying to figure out that one.

Linguists continue to cogitate and have agitated arguments over the issue of the evolution of the first language. But the point is, they can argue because language and words evolved and they exist. And it is a fact that language is what has separated humans from the birds, bees, lions, tigers, apes, fishes, crabs, whales, dolphins, elephants and Neanderthals. These creatures communicate too (or communicated too, in case of Neanderthals) with grunts, tunes, trills, gestures, dances and notes; but none of them can (or could) talk or communicate in ways as complex as humans.

Neanderthals evidently had the tools in them to talk, but were too primitive to develop speech, which ultimately fell into the forte of our ancestors, the homo sapiens, who evolved somewhere in Central Africa.

Sometimes, I wonder if the famed Ethiopian Lucy of the Australopithecus family called out to her beloved in words or grunts or notes? She has been much celebrated with words by not only intellectuals but also by songsters like Beatles and Elton John. And yet, perhaps 3.2 million years ago, did she speak? Would she be able to understand the serenades for her?

Would she be able to comprehend any of the modern languages we use today? Can you believe that currently there are more than 5,000 languages in the world?! It might seem an astounding figure, especially compared to Lucy’s times, but from a handful of people, the human family has to grown 7,500,000,000 large… quite a leap from Lucy’s lifetime, I believe!

At some point the first language must have started with grunts coming out of descendants of Lucy, the first men and women that lived in Africa and, eventually, in their progeny who walked out of Africa to create homes all over the world. We, the progeny of these walkers, now speak in complex sentences, using varied words in varied languages that probably our early ancestors would have found impossible to comprehend.

Languages, like their users, tend to run into each other. They share some words or some word roots in common. They could all exist in harmony and learn from each other if they did not join their users in a rat race to prove themselves superior or the most spoken. With a cutthroat cultural race among different nations and states, languages have become a commodity. Politicians use it to prove their prowess and power. Some languages have been wiped completely off from the surface of the Earth by invaders and rulers or sneers from people who considered them inferior. Some of the power brokers ironed out the differences among people who lived under their protection by ironing out their language and uniting them under the banner of one language that they called the national language.

Today, when a person speaks, he is immediately classified into a nationality, a class, a creed, a culture and a region. Henry Higgins of Pygmalion (play by G.B. Shaw, 1913) and My Fair Lady (Hollywood adaptation of Pygmalion) fame created more than a century ago made a pertinent observation on this issue. He says,

…an Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him: the moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him...

We can apply this well in the context of the spoken word, not just for English speakers or ‘an Englishman’ as he says, but for speakers of all languages. The minute we open our mouth, we are labeled.

There are people who frown on users of languages they consider spoken or used by hostile groups. But one just wonders, is it the fault of the language or the users? We associate the power of words with the negative impact the users have made on society…much like we associate the power of the atom with the devastation caused by the nuclear bomb.

Then, there is the case of mother tongue… when you do not speak, read or write it, people among your family and friends often frown… I have always wondered why? Perhaps, because of the theory that says language evolved from mother tongue, that is the sounds used by the mother to communicate with the baby… then it must have been in an arboreal environment… now, we do it in more than 5000 different ways! And yet, in this long linguistic list missing is the original mother tongue of all mother tongues that evolved in Africa 100,000 or 200,000 years ago! We do not even know what the language is…

Our research of speech starts with the written words. The oldest known written language is Egyptian or is it Sumerian…? I am confused! Logically, there must have been something they spoke before they built palaces and homes… and that would be the mother tongue of all the human race. That is what we all would be speaking if we went by tradition and culture…that is what our ancient ancestors spoke when they walked out to populate the beautiful green Earth. And that is what we have lost to the dusts of time…

Now the babel of more than 5000 languages have become sources of unhappy divisions instead of a means to communicate to make our own lives easier and happier. I wonder, how our great (to the power a hundred and twenty thousand generations or more) grandmother, the celebrated Lucy, would react to this medley of words …

Many hundreds of years ago, the fictitious Hamlet was given these famed lines to cogitate over by the bard that gave him life, Shakespeare,

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?

Hamlet was agitated over his fate. And I stand agitated over the fuzz I see growing on my son’s face. So, these are lines I dedicate to all the men who think the unkempt, unshaven look makes them appear macho… or men who are just too lazy to shave!

To shave or not shave… that is the question…

Whether it is nobler in the face to suffer

The pricks of fuzzy growth,

Or to take arms against a sea of hair,

And by shaving end them?

It has become my sorrow to see my twenty-year-old son’s handsome face concealed by a hairy outcropping most days of the week. When I tell him to shave, he grunts, and it rarely gets done…

And yet, I remember a long, long time ago, when my son was three-years-old and he had lovely smooth skin, he jumped with delight to see his father shave. He wanted so much to shave on a daily basis that he tried it on his own soft cheeks… luckily we caught him before any disaster struck. I occasionally try to revive his interest in shaving by recalling this incident. But, he just walks out saying,” Mamma!” in a tone laced with embarrassment and reprimand!

My friend had better luck with her seventeen-year-old. She whispered to him that he looked like an unkempt terrorist with his fungal growth. He went to the bathroom and came back clean-shaven.

I tried the same with my son…It failed.

When he was a child, I remember reading to him from a book called the Thingummajigs Book of Manners. In that book Thingummajigs were described as creatures with beards and long hair who rarely bathed and had very bad manners. It was in verse with colourful pictures of these creatures. He even enjoyed reading it himself. And he was so convinced by the book that he used to wonder if every long haired and unshaven man was a Thingummajig. We had to keep telling him they were not.

Then, there were the Twits, created by Roald Dahl, where the husband has mice, stale food and all kinds of filthy things in his unkempt facial hirsute outcropping! A book which all of us enjoyed and I would have thought it would have impacted my son for life…to shave regularly…But in vain!

And now he talks of Movember. That has become a reason not to shave… in May?! I googled Movember…It happens only every November… Actually Movember is about growing a nice, neat, trimmed, well-shaped moustache in the month of November to “change the face of men’s health”.

I, personally, cannot empathize with a moustache either…

I, like Tennyson, would like to mourn. He mourned the loss of his friend, Arthur Hallum, and I weep for the loss of the smooth, clean cheeks of my twenty-year-old. With due apologies to Tennyson’s poetic genius, I adapt his famous concluding lines from Break, Break, Break to express the sorrow of parting with my son’s smooth cheeks…

I see it rise incarnadine with blood.
A great tsunami that threatens to flood
The world with gore born of hate.
Fear and violence open the gate
Of living, vivid hell
In which garb dwell
Differences drawn by men
They say for kin and ken…

Do you see that distant wave?

I see it lave and soothe
With it’s lulling tune.
I see it calm and blue
Reflecting the golden hue
Of the bright sun ray.
People are happy at work and play.
They say the world is but one land
And, united, we all akin stand.

He had finished a M.Com degree and management course at the local university and was waiting for a job, which for all practical purposes had eluded him for the last one year. He wanted a good job, an easy one with a good pay and designation. He didnot care what the job was but did care that he should have an easy time and plenty of money. Such jobs were hard to come by and Shyam just waited patiently.

Crotchety with boredom and a good life in his parental home, Shyam decided to start a detective agency. He advertised his services online. His advertisement said his agency provided services of all kinds from hunting for lost pets to looking for criminals to delving into conspiracies.

His first case was that of a missing dog. Macho, the dog in question had gone missing from a pet care centre while his mistress was getting her nails done at a nearby parlour. Macho had been missing for one whole day.

Shyam went to the pet care centre, the dog pound, animal shelter, the owner’s home in vain. At the pet care centre, the employees were very cold to him. He got no information. At the pound and animal shelter, dogs in cages barked and bared their fangs at him. Shyam was scared of dogs. He was not too happy. The owner was distressed and kept calling him till the evening, when she informed him that Macho had returned home on his own and therefore his services were not needed.

Shyam took missing pets off his list.

His mother found out about the advertisement. She forced him take criminals off his list.

Now, all Shyam was left with was conspiracies. No one called him to help them solve a mystery. He still didnot have his perfect job or any job. He started delving into conspiracy theories on his own. But that was taking him nowhere and was too taxing on his brain. He needed people his age to interact with. He needed friends. So, he decided to form an anti-corruption and conspiracy club. All members needed to pay an annual membership of only Rs 100 to start with. Shyam got together a bunch of young people who met every evening under the tall banyan tree in the park to discuss politics, corruption scandals and conspiracy theories. They were all young men with not much to do and enough money to spare. Some of them were Shyam’s classmates, who like him, waited for the easiest way to make money and have an easy life. Shyam had collected nearly one thousand twelve hundred rupees, which meant there were twelve members in the club.

Thirteen young people in a park under a banyan tree discussing politics started drawing attention. That is when Shyam thought it would be better to have the gathering indoors. The twelve members of his club agreed. They discussed renting a small room and expanding their club. They raised the entrance fee to one thousand. Surprisingly, they found takers. They now rented a small room in a big house and held their meetings there. Not that the meeting generated action but it helped people voice their opinions and relax. It was an outlet to talk, especially for people who were not getting anywhere.

Over a period of five years, the membership and the annual membership fee increased. Shyam found, a higher membership fee was directly proportional to the increase in number of applicants. Of course, they had to provide facilities like a cafeteria, music, television. So, Shyam rented a small house. The kitchen was handed over to a local tea stall owner. He was quite happy to oblige and run the cafeteria in the dining-drawing area.The music was provided by a rejected karaoke system from Shyam’s home. They installed a big second hand TV in another room, which they called the movie room. The ACC (Anti-Corruption and Conspiracy) club gained in popularity. Shyam stopped looking for a job as he became the founder of a fairly popular people’s club and he started making a lot of money from the annual membership fee.The club’s popularity with rich, unemployed youth invited the attention of the local politicians and journalists, especially as it claimed to be a club dedicated to the unearthing of corruption and conspiracies. They started patronising the club. The local politicians tried to raise funds and clout for their cause and parties and the journalists tried to scent out scandals. The club started becoming the breeding grounds for the young monied and money-makers. The club moved to it’s own building. Now, the club had it’s own restaurant and gym. Then, it acquired a pool table and swimming pool. A crooner, a bar and another posh restaurant further enhanced it’s attractions.

Shyam’s ACC club became popular and the talk of the town. Ten years down the line, it was a prestigious and professional men’s club. Anyone who was someone professionally belonged to the ACC. Young jobless wastrels no longer found their way to the club. The club became a hotbed for conspiring for entry into the club and for gaining influence or finance in or from the government or industry.

The twelve founding members had all become powerful, influential and wealthy. Six had joined politics. One of them was running for the parliament as his godfather, the local member of parliament, was retiring. Four had become leading journalists whose copy had to be re-written, but they were unparalleled in scenting out scandals. People feared them. If a scandal could not be found by others, they were sure to scent it out with their unparalleled skills. Newspapers vied to employ them. The eleventh one had become a godman, a great Yogi. He founded his own ashram and taught yoga to the rich and famous. There were some drug and sex scandals in which his name was implicated but everything was quieted down as the four journalists vouched for his godliness. His holiness was above scandals. If anything, the rumours drew a bigger crowd to his ashram. The last one had become a businessman known for his ‘connections’. No one knew exactly what he did but he was very rich and powerful. It was said that he was the man who created the chief minister of the state.

Shyam, of course, became very wealthy. He had opened chapters of the club in other parts of the country too. TheBusiness Weekly had named him the ‘Man of the Year’ five years running. He had found his niche job among the wealthy and powerful. Here was a man who had achieved his dream.

I flit in and out of night,
A dark passage without a light.
And then, again it is bright.
Sunshine blinds my site.
Happiness dulls the pain
That recurs again and again.
I see the gold that lines the clouds.
I see the rainbow the storms announced.
And, yet, when I am hurt, I shout.
My pain twirls me around.
All I can see is black.
There is a lack
Of air.
Claustrophobia sets in.
It hurts.
My lung hurts.
My brain hurts.
My body hurts.
My heart hurts.
I wait for the end.
Again, I am lifted by a gust and carried
Beyond the pain.
Everything is righted again.
The rainbow glitters bright and clean.
Till I encounter another gust of wind
That carries me back to darkness.

With each cycle, I become more oblivious to the change.
The darkness recedes faster.
I can see the light pierce through the night.

I become strong and bold
For fire only purifies gold.

Cleansed

I pour the anguish of my soul,
The pain in my heart, all into one bowl
And then drown it
In the middle of the turbulent river.
I see it sink, sink to the bottom.
Inky, muddy, sodden, it lies there
Till it is picked up by a strong current
And carried to the ocean
Where it breaks
Against the jagged rocks,
Letting out the screams, sighs and tears
Which are drowned by the sound
Of the waves that lash against
The broken bowl,
Shattered to smithereens
By the sea.
The angst is cleansed,
Cleansed by the infinite ocean,
Evaporated to the skies,
Lost in the clouds …
And then,
Sprinkled by the rain…
Till the anger becomes minuscule,
Smaller than a subatomic grain.

And you notice again,

How blue the ocean,
How vast the skies,
How wonderful the entire creation…
And,
Where am I?